GLib 2.9.0 released

[Matthias Clasen <mclasen redhat com>]

GLib 2.9.0 is now available for download at:

   ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.9/
   http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/glib/2.9/

glib-2.9.0.tar.bz2	md5sum: b71e24bba5e137d39ed576e1dfdd3680
glib-2.9.0.tar.gz	md5sum: 3148ba2159c1de84e93c012fee04cd54

This is the first development release leading up to GLib 2.10.  

Notes:

 * This is unstable development release. While it has had
   a bit of testing, there are certainly plenty of bugs
   remaining to be found. This release should not be used
   in production.

 * Installing this version will overwrite your existing
   copy of GLib 2.8. If you have problems, you'll need
   to reinstall GLib 2.8.4.

 * GLib 2.10 will be source and binary compatible with
   the GLib 2.8.x series; however, the new API additions
   in GLib 2.9.0 are not yet finalized, so there may
   be incompatibities between this release and the final
   2.10 release.

 * Remaining issues for GLib 2.10 can be found with the 
   following bugzilla query:


http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=glib&target_milestone=2.10
+API+Freeze&&target_milestone=2.10
+Freeze&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED

 * Bugs should be reported to http://bugzilla.gnome.org.
   
About GLib
==========

GLib is the low-level core library that forms the basis for projects
such as GTK+ and GNOME. It provides data structure handling for C,
portability wrappers, and interfaces for such runtime functionality as
an event loop, threads, dynamic loading, and an object system.

More information about GLib is available at:

 http://www.gtk.org/

An installation guide for the GTK+ libraries, including GLib, can
be found at:

 http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/gtk-building.html


Overview of Changes from GLib 2.8.x to GLib 2.9.0
=================================================
* Unicode support:
 - The Unicode tables have been updated to Unicode 4.1, 
   adding several new values to the GUnicodeBreakType 
   enumeration. This breaks Pango <= 1.10 
   [Behdad Esfahbod]
 - The various Unicode character predicate functions 
   (g_unichar_isalpha, g_unichar_isdigit,...) have
   been optimized
   [Behdad]
 - g_utf8_pointer_to_offset, g_utf8_offset_to_pointer:
   These functions handle negative offsets now, and
   going backwards in g_utf8_offset_to_pointer uses
   "stutter stepping".
   [Larry Ewing, Matthias Clasen]

* Memory management:
 - Mem chunks are no longer used internally in GLib and
   GObject. GMemChunk will be deprecated in GLib 2.10
 - All APIs based on GAllocator (g_list_push/pop_allocator,
   and similar push/pop_allocator functions for other
   data structures) have been deprecated, since they
   never worked as intended.
 - The g_slice_* functions have been added as a 
   new API for fast allocation of small memory blocks. 
   The implementation in GLib 2.9.0 is just a simple 
   wrapper around malloc. GLib 2.10 will have an
   efficient and scalable implementation. 
   [Tim Janik, Matthias]

* Pattern matching:
 - g_pattern_match has been optimized to avoid
   unnecessary recursion.
   [Tim, Matthias]

* g_intern_string, g_intern_static_string: 
 - New functions to intern strings. These are now used 
   by GObject to avoid duplicating static strings 
   [Matthias]

* g_thread_foreach: 
 - New function to iterate over all GThreads 
   [Tim, Matthias]

* g_date_set_time_t, g_date_set_time_val:
 - New functions to set a GDate from a time_t or
   GTimeVal value. g_date_set_time has been deprecated 
   in favor of these.
   [Roger Leigh]

* g_snprintf and g_vsnprintf:
 - These functions are no longer declared in gprintf.h, 
   since they are in glib.h
   [Matthias]



November 18, 2005

Matthias Clasen